#HomeschoolLife is the hashtag families use to show what it looks like to educate children at home: kitchen-table lessons, curriculum choices, field trips with a co-op and the ordinary chaos of a household that is also a classroom. It sits alongside broader tags such as #Homeschooling, #Homeschool and #HomeschoolMom. Homeschooling itself, as Wikipedia defines it, “is the education of school-aged children in places other than a traditional school.”
Origin
The hashtag has no documented first post; it grew out of a practice with a long history, told here mostly through U.S. sources because that is where the best public data exists.
- Colonial roots. Wikipedia notes that “Homeschooling in the US began during the colonial period.”
- 1970s, unschooling. Educator John Holt argued that informal education was better than compulsory education, and “The term unschooling was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt” (Wikipedia).
- 1980s, legal fights. “In the 1980s, homeschooling was illegal throughout much of the United States for parents who were not themselves trained educators,” and the Home School Legal Defense Association, “founded in 1983, was highly successful in influencing the legal status of homeschooling” (Wikipedia). Today, according to the Census Bureau, “Homeschooling is a legal instructional option in all 50 states.”
- 1999-2012, steady growth. Federal survey data from NCES show the share of homeschooled students “increased from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 3.4 percent in 2012,” though the share was lower in 2019 than in 2012.
- 2020, the pandemic jump. The U.S. Census Bureau found about 5.4% of households with school-aged children reported homeschooling in spring 2020, and “By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12),” a doubling. The survey added a clarification so that families reported true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school. Some states moved far more than others: “Massachusetts, for example, jumped from 1.5% to 12.1% while many other states did not show a significant change.”
How It’s Used
Posts under #HomeschoolLife are mostly first-person diaries rather than news. Parents share daily schedules, reading lists, science experiments, curriculum hauls and outings, and use the tag to find other families. That content reflects how varied homeschooling is: Wikipedia describes a spectrum running “from highly structured forms based on traditional school lessons” to unschooling, where the parent tries to turn the child’s interests into educational moments. Wikipedia adds that “Unschooling is often seen as a subset of homeschooling, the key difference lying in the use of an external or individual curriculum.”
The tag also carries the community side of home education. Wikipedia explains that “A homeschool cooperative is a cooperative of families who homeschool their children,” where children can learn from parents with specialist knowledge, and that “Some co-ops also offer events such as prom and graduation for homeschoolers.” During the pandemic, the Census Bureau pointed to “pandemic pods”, “small groups of students gathering outside a formal school setting for in-person instruction,” as part of the same search for options beyond the neighborhood school.
Not every family homeschools for long. According to Wikipedia, “Only about 10% of homeschool families use homeschool from Kindergarten through the end of high school,” so for many people posting #HomeschoolLife it is a phase rather than a permanent arrangement.
Why Families Homeschool: NCES 2019
Parents could select several reasons. Figures are the share of homeschooled students whose parents chose each one, from the NCES Fast Facts page; a dash means NCES does not report that figure on the page.
| Reason | Selected as a reason | Most important reason |
|---|---|---|
| Concern about school environment (safety, drugs, negative peer pressure) | 80% | 25% |
| Desire to provide moral instruction | 75% | — |
| Emphasis on family life together | 75% | — |
| Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools | 73% | 15% |
| Desire to provide religious instruction | — | 13% |
NCES adds that other reasons parents wrote in included “child being bullied, finances, travel, and a more flexible schedule.” NCES also cautions that its survey figures cannot be directly compared with the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse estimates.
Sources
- https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/homeschooling-on-the-rise-during-covid-19-pandemic.html
- https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_States
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling